Last survivors recall Dustbowl’

Last month a dust storm caused near blackout conditions in northern Oklahoma. According to reports, nearly three dozen vehicles were involved in an accident, and several people were injured.

For those few who can remember, the scene might have been reminiscent of the Dust Bowl, the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history and the subject of a two-part Ken Burns documentary airing at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on WGBH Channel 2.

One of the reasons the filmmaker felt the urgency to make “The Dust Bowl” was because there are so few remaining eyewitnesses to the catastrophic 1930s event, which was caused by over-farming and severe drought.

So the filmmaker put out calls for participants on public television stations in the Midwest asking for personal histories and photographs.

Despite the passing of time, memories were still fresh for those who went through the horrible event. In one scene in “The Dust Bowl,” two sisters in their 80s break down and cry over their 2-year-old sister, who died in 1935.

The Dust Bowl lasted for 10 years, leading to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. One of them was Calvin Crabill, whose father, John, was a stockman who had been forced to work the soil in southeastern Colorado during what was called the Great Plow-Up.

That’s when “suitcase farmers” in the 1920s flocked to the Midwest for cheap land.

Some might maintain that the terrible event was the byproduct of greed. These speculators dug up the native hardy buffalo grass, which had held the soil because its roots go deep, and replaced it with profitable crops such as corn, which were shallowly plowed.

As it happened, the 1920s were unusually wet for the Midwest, so that planting strategy worked for a while.

But no conservation or irrigation measures were put in place, and toward the end of the decade severe drought conditions set in. Many of the profiteers then deserted, leaving large swaths of land unattended.

The winds blew, picking up the dried-out soil and creating black blizzards.

“The isolation was so complete that you can imagine what it would be like for one of these mountain ranges coming toward you and not knowing what it was,” says Burns, who made the film with longtime collaborator Dayton Duncan.

As more than one person said about the infamous “Black Sunday” in 1935, it looked like the world was coming to an end. The superstorm, which mostly hit Oklahoma, is believed to have removed 300 million tons of topsoil. Dust ended up as far away as New York City.

Actually, the sentiment “It’s the end of the world” was repeated many times during the decade.

During one storm, in Pampa, Texas, folk singer Woody Guthrie found himself taking shelter with some religious folks who said, “It’s the end of the world.” So he sat down and wrote a jaunty little song called “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” As the lyrics go, “This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, and I got to be driftin’ along.” Guthrie, like many others, would head for California.

Crabill’s family would end up in Burbank. But in Colorado in the 1930s he was “a little cowboy” who rode to school on his horse. As a boy, his job was to round up the cattle. When his teacher sent his class home because a dust cloud started coming up, he remembers trying to get the cattle rounded up during the storm.

“I was a little boy who had gone to Sunday school,” says Crabill. “I just assumed it was the end of the world. That was it.”

Burns notes that Crabill was one of the lucky ones. Thousands of people died of what was called dust pneumonia.

“Tiny particles of this dirt, this sand, would get in the lungs and cause infections, and this took the youngest and the oldest, and sometimes the strapping healthy teenager as well. It was debilitating,” he says.

Burns doesn’t want to draw parallels between what happened during the 1920s and ’30s and the droughts occurring today, but says we are making some of the same mistakes.

While there have been more conservation efforts and more intelligent planting methods, he notes, “The biggest thing was that we started figuring out we could draw it from the Ogallala Aquifer, which runs from southern Canada to central Texas and contains a lot of glacial meltwater, and we’re depleting that.

“And when that’s gone then you have the possibility, which was the great fear in the mid-’30s, that we’ll have an American Sahara Desert in the center of the country,” Burns says. “And that’s not a pipe dream. It’s a real, real possibility.”

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